Miss Daisy Is Crazy reminded me a great deal of Louis Sachar’s Wayside School books. A.J. is an uninterested student, newly assigned to Miss Daisy’s class. A.J. complains about hating school and hating schoolwork, and Miss Daisy agrees with him, seeming to be even more clueless about the subjects that she is supposed to teach than A.J. and her students. The students become teachers to their teacher.
To me, reading as an adult, I see Miss Daisy’s brilliant teaching strategy, which also includes inviting a guest speaker, a football star whom A.J. admires, to talk about the importance of basic school subjects. I believe her ignorance to be faked. Miss Daisy actually seems more brilliant than Sachar’s Mrs. Jewls, though they share personalities and both teach unconventionally.
Mrs. Jewls memorably drops computers out of the thirtieth story window to teach gravity. She attempts to teach Joe to count, but counting correctly as she teaches him, he routinely gets the incorrect answer, while getting the correct answer when he counts listing the numbers out of their usual order.
Miss Daisy has the children teach her math using bonbons and correct her misspellings. By seeming ignorant and to need help, she grows the students’ confidence and encourages them to share what they know in a fun way.
Mrs. Jewls, though described as kind for the most part, can cut down her students’ confidence, as she does to Joe or poor Todd, who almost always gets sent home from school early, though he is rarely the troublemaker that Mrs. Jewls makes him out to be.
I, however, found the Wayside School series far more humorous than I found this book of My Weird School. Wayside School is my sort of absurdist humor. Humor does not seem to be the intent of this book of My Weird School.
In the first graphic novel in the Weird School universe, Mr. Corbett Is in Orbit!, a tour guide is aboard a space shuttle with A.J. and his class when A.J. launches the shuttle accidentally. Mr. Corbett is not a trained astronaut. He has not prepared to go to space alone, let alone with a group of untrained children.
Mr. Corbett loses consciousness, and it is up to the class to turn the shuttle around and safely land so that they can be rescued. Mr. Corbett does not, like Miss Daisy I believe does, make the class take initiative by choice but through circumstance and accidentally.
My sampling for this series, which is VAST—
- 21 books in the My Weird School series
- 12 books each in the series My Weird School Daze, My Weirder School, My Weirdest School
- 11 at least to come in the new series My Weirder-est School
- 7 super special editions
- 2 books of writing tips
- 8 Fast Facts
- 4 I Can Read leveled readers
- 1 graphic novel
- 90 BOOKS IN TOTAL!
—is extremely poor yet, but I was disappointed when comparing these two.
I actually enjoyed the beginning chapter book better than the graphic novel—a rarity—especially when the graphic novel provides far more adventure than the realistic chapter book.
It seemed almost to me that Gutman has drifted away from the original premise of Miss Daisy Is Crazy!—which honestly, with such a collection, that he would do so is hardly surprising and perhaps even necessary. But I prefer the idea of a clever teacher tricking her class into liking class more than I like the idea of a class needing to step up when adults fail them in life-or-death circumstances (at least in realistic fiction; action/adventure fantasies like Harry Potter or The Blackthorn Key is another genre).
I was disappointed that Miss Daisy, a white woman, though called dumb, seems competent, while Mr. Corbett, a Black man, seems incompetent and incapable of helping the children. I suspect that this is a problem of sampling more than it is a series problem. However.
I seriously doubt that I will ever do a full sampling of this series. 90 is just too many books to even think about acquiring, especially as I have struggled to find these books on my Libby app.)
A.J. himself does not seem to be coded as white, is coded possibly as Latinx. The class is diverse.
Have you read any of these books? What are your thoughts? Should I sick with the series? Are there particular books that I should read?
*** **
Gutman, Dan. My Weird School, Book 1: Miss Daisy Is Crazy! Illus. Jim Paillot. HarperTrophy-HarperCollins, 2004.
Gutman, Dan. My Weird School Graphic Novel, Book 1: Mr. Corbett Is in Orbit! Illus. Jim Paillot. HarperAlley-HarperCollins, 2021.
Intended audience: Ages 6-10.
Explore the whole series on Gutman’s website.
This review is not endorsed by Dan Gutman, Jim Paillot, HarperTrophy, HarperAlley, or HarperCollins. It is an independent, honest review by a reader.
Dragon Bite Books 